Mazda 6 Wagon

Zoom-zoom with a back room.

Nothing says "new family" quite like a station wagon. It's the G-rated matinee of the dealership over there in the corner of the showroom, the one with the dinky engine, automatic transmission, and six-month supply of Gerber prune packs thrown in. You, the parents with the convertible to trade, sign here and shut up.

That's old thinking, the kind that convinced Lexus to ban stick shifts from its IS300 SportCross, the kind that persuaded BMW to offer a 3-series wagon with only the small six, and the kind that has been leaning legions of wagon prospects toward more butch-looking sport-utilities.

Now, if Mazda were to build the BMW 3-series wagon, dollars will get you doughnuts the options sheet would include the M3's engine. Let's see what 333 horsepower does to a prune pack! Well, Mazda doesn't build the 3-series, but it does make the 6 s sedan, which won Car and Driver10Best honors in 2003, and it does have its "zoom-zoom" tag line around its neck as well as one that states, "It's all about the drive." Build a Mazda 6 wagon that isn't all about the drive, and people are likely to start throwing prune packs.

But Mazda kept its head in the game and delivered both a wagon and a five-door hatchback with as much amusingly youthful performance as you're entitled to get for this price. In fact, you can't even buy a wagon with the base Mazda 6 2.3-liter four. Wagons haul their Huggies only with the 220-hp, 3.0-liter DOHC 24-valve V-6.

The price? It starts at $22,745, a modest credit-card swipe that includes all the suspension, wheels, and tires needed to extract the performance numbers recorded here. The $770 Sport package is of the paint-'n'-tape variety, including fog lights, side-sill extensions, a liftgate spoiler, brawnier bumper fascias, glinting exhaust tips, and a body-color grille. The Luxury pack uses your $1540 to buy heated leather seats with eight power adjustments for the driver, plus electroluminescent dials. A sunroof slips in for $700, $635 lands a Bose audio package with a six-CD changer and a Bose-enhanced speaker array, and side and curtain airbags enhance safety for $450.

So the dandy pictured here painted in metallic pencil lead trades for $26,840, quite a lean lien by today's standards, even if you opt for the $900 automatic transmission. To be sure, the 6's plain plastic interior doesn't have carved-aluminum footrests or a humidor trimmed with abalone shell, but to enthusiasts, it has the equipment where it counts. Instead of struts and beam axles, this wagon rides on a relatively complex tangle of control arms and links in the front and back, sticking to the road on pricier Michelin HX MXM4 all-season rubber.

It's a sports-sedan setup all the way, but the suspension specs alone don't guarantee a good-handling car, says Mazda's Phil Spender. "It's all in the way you execute it at the plant."